Obama's gas

I confess, I'm a loud-mouth critic of people who insist on driving heavy and dangerous trucks to the office or to do daily errands, but a guy who nevertheless owns a vehicle that gets, with a good tailwind, about one mile per gallon.

It's a boat, of course and these days I think carefully about where I'm going with it before I leave the dock. I probably don't use too much more than 500 gallons a year, which is still a whole lot less than I used to use as a commuter driving a small car. If gasoline rose to 5 or 6 or 7 dollars a gallon at the fuel docks, I probably wouldn't change the number of hours I put on the boat, but if I were driving to work, as many of you do, that 7500 pound, 8-12 mpg "SUV" or super heavy duty monster truck might just get traded for something less absurd.

So I have to make another confession: I secretly wish fuel prices would soar long enough to make urban hipsters go back to taking the bus or driving Fiat 500's, and suburbanites trade in their grotesque fashion statements for cars.

Of course the noises bubbling up from the bottom of the national cesspool have been blaming Barack Obama and "liberals" for those scary numbers that appear on gas station signs, as if it were the president or some government office that dictated prices on the free world market rather than the laws of supply and demand and the mechanisms of capitalism. I'm tempted to say that the self-appointed guardians of the free market either haven't the most elementary idea of how those markets work or perhaps are simply too dishonest to risk not blaming Obama for rising world demand. No sir, there's no pea under that particular walnut shell and if even a small proportion of Republicans had the mental wherewithal to deal with the notion that economic recovery means increased demand for resources, they might figure out that those screaming the loudest have a vested interest in a collapsing economy. As the infamous Rush once said: "I hope he fails."

So yes, some Republicans, some voices from the corporate owned media are also wishing for a big increase because the public is stupid enough, or so they hope, to believe that the "socialist" Obama is behind it all. You'll remember John McCain making that moronic accusation when gas prices soared under George Bush. No, he didn't blame Bush or the huge demand for fuel his wars gave us, he blamed Obama, because that's what Republicans do, they blame the other guy for their own actions; they blame the opposition for the workings of the natural forces of the same free markets they pretend to worship.

No, the old song is about the holy market and how all the ugly features of unrestrained capitalism like disregard for public safety and the powerlessness of an oppressed work force would wither away if we only let them drill for oil in your town's reservoir or chain your kids to a punch press the same way those Commies do, but the reality is that they have a very selective interest in capitalism and the high priests of 'enlightened self interest' are trying as hard as they can to take the enlightenment out of it.

So yes, rising energy costs sap the strength of the recovery and so that's just what a certain party wants so that they can go on pretending there is no recovery or that it would be a much better recovery if only they had someone like that Mad Monk Santorum in the White House. So maybe "jobs, jobs, jobs" is now last month's mantra because we're creating more jobs every week that were created under that 8 year Republican debacle. So it's time to turn on a dime and let's put on that Jumpin' Jack Flash disc 'cause now it's all gas, gas, gas.

Passing gas

What with the cost of gasoline these days, we can expect a renewed outbreak of gimmicks, scams and slinky salesmanship designed to relieve the panicked and gullible of some extra cash. Since I began reading car magazines and accessory catalogs as a kid in the 1950's there have always been gadgets: magnets you clamp on your fuel line, resistors to put in series with the ignition cables, little pills that go in the gas tank, things you put in the air intake, little propellers that fit under a carburettor (remember those?) and all kinds of additives. None of them ever worked at all. They still don't.

More recently tire shops have begun to sell the idea that filling your tires with pure Nitrogen for about ten bucks a tire will increase your gas mileage. They have arguments like the one that says they will stay up to pressure longer than the 80% nitrogen, oxygen and carbon dioxide you breathe for free, and your tires will last longer. Humbug. Yes, it will prevent the inside of your tires from oxidizing, but that's isn't a problem in the first place. It will slightly slow air loss from the tires, but if you check them once a month -- as you should do anyway -- you don't have a problem in need of solving. Will you live long enough, considering the $40 and monthly refills to see any benefit? Medical science isn't promising immortality any time soon.

Sales of new SUV's are off and resale prices are down significantly. Common wisdom has it that what we really need is tiny cars with tiny engines screaming their lungs out to produce enough acceleration so that Mom's megatruck won't run you over, but is that the answer? Not always. My wife's little PT Cruiser, for instance, doesn't get the highway mileage of my Corvette and is about equal around town. In fact the 400 hp car is relatively equal to a Hyundae Sonata in the mileage department because it's made of lightweight composites and has a 6 speed transmission -- and that brings me to my point: learn to drive a manual transmission and you'll save a lot more gas than you will with any of the things that bolt on or pour in your ride, and your slow car will be a little bit faster too.

That shoebox look may be a real sexy thing if you're 16 and have a bone through your nose, but shoebox aerodynamics cost you money and that $300 wing you bought from J.C. Whitney is only going to make it worse. If you drive at any speed, aerodynamics matter -- a lot. If you don't need all wheel drive, don't buy it. It adds a lot of weight and reduces mechanical efficiency.

But hey -- you just had to have that Escalade didn't you?